All posts tagged BBC

The British Broadcasting Corp. is set to add a commercial download platform and a personalized digital music service amid a revamp of its online digital platforms.

The U.K.’s national broadcaster Tuesday said U.K. users will be able to buy a selection of BBC programs as downloads through a commercial, online platform called BBC Store. The BBC gave no details on the subscription model and cost.

It is also launching a music service called Playlister “in the coming days” that will allow users to tag and save lists of tracks they have heard on music and television shows. These can then be exported and played in full on digital music platforms such as Spotify, YouTube and Deezer, through smartphones, tablets and Internet-connected televisions. Users will also get hand-picked recommendations from DJs and hosts.

The BBC also plans changes to its popular online catch-up and live streaming service for video and audio, iPlayer. Dubbed “next generation” by the BBC and launching in the first half of 2014, the revamped iPlayer will have a standard 30-day catch-up window for content, compared with seven days currently, subject to approval by the corporation’s governing body.

Injury-claim firm RMPI, acting for Mr. McAlpine, has issued a statement on his behalf Thursday morning requesting those users should make a voluntary donation of £25 to BBC Children In Need.

In the statement Mr. McAlpine said: “Whilst I reached a settlement last year with both the BBC and ITV, I would like to now draw this unfortunate episode, forced into my life, to a close … I have requested that my lawyers, RMPI LLP, focus on the action against Sally Bercow and that damages arising from this are donated to a charity of her choice.”

U.K. startup Foodity has been chosen as the first commercial partnership with the BBC Labs initiative.

Last June, as we reported, the commercial arm of the U.K. state broadcaster, BBC Worldwide, launched a mentoring program for digital startups called BBC Labs. Now, the first of the hoped-for commercial partnerships has been announced.

It brings together the startup Foodity, supermarket giant Tesco and BBC Good Food, has one of the U.K.’s most popular recipe sites, GoodFood.com. It attracts 8 million unique users and 45 million views each month, according to The Next Web.

A dedicated sports app from the BBC is now available in the U.K. for the iPhone and iPod Touch with news, live scores, commentary and analysis. It follows the success of the broadcaster’s Olympic app which offered up to 24 simultaneous live streams and was downloaded more than two million times.

The Next Web carries a hands-on review which suggests the writer was slightly underwhelmed by the app’s current functions.

Injury-claim lawyers RMPI, acting for Mr. McAlpine, have written a letter for those wishing to apologize for their tweet or re-tweet. “It is not this firm or Lord McAlpine’s intention to create any hardship,” the letter reassures. It tells users they will be liable for an-as-yet-to-be-determined fixed fee.

For Twitter the action is a coming of age, a realization that the web makes publishers of everyone. And, as the thousands who tweeted or re-tweeted statements concerning Mr. McAlpine are to discover, being a publisher brings responsibilities.

What every U.K. journalist knows is that to repeat a libel is to generate a fresh one. They also know that hiding behind “she said it too” is not a defense. You do not substantiate your innocence by proving the guilt of others, as many a parent has drummed into their offspring.

Nor too is it a defense that your tweet wasn’t itself defamatory. Ruth Collard, a partner at Carter-Ruck, one of the U.K.’s leading libel lawyers, said a person could still be liable “if the context of it is such that people will have understood it in a particular way.”

All in all, Twitter users might want to dig up a copy of McNae’s Essential Law for Journalists.

Several thousand Twitter users face an anxious wait to discover if they will face legal action by lawyers acting for Alistair McAlpine, the former U.K. Conservative party treasurer who was wrongly implicated in child-abuse allegations.

Research commissioned by The Wall Street Journal shows the number of mentions of the keyword “McAlpine” went from 52 on Nov. 1, the day before the BBC “Newsnight” broadcast which did not name the peer, to 1,674 on the day of transmission. The average ‘background noise’ of mention of that keyword averages around 30-50 a day.

On Nov. 8, the day before it was revealed that Mr. McAlpine had been wrongly implicated, the number of mentions had nearly doubled to 3,586. In the period between Nov 2 and Nov. 8, there were 10,090 mentions. It should be noted that this is a simple keyword search on the name and is likely to return more tweets than the number specifically mentioning Mr. McAlpine.

The London Olympics created a huge surge in demand for the BBC iPlayer catch-up and streaming service for video and audio. The U.K. state broadcaster’s figures show a record 196 million program requests for TV and radio content.

In the week starting July 30, 51 million programs were accessed by 11.5 million people, another record. The iPlayer is available online and on more than 400 platforms and devices including smartphones, tablets and televisions, according to Digital Spy.

The BBC is to launch a service inside Facebook which will allow people to watch, share and comment on live video from this summer’s Olympic Games. It is already being beta tested using streams of the tennis from Wimbledon.

Although the concept could be a precursor to similar services from other broadcasters the BBC’s Olympic Facebook app will only be available to people in the U.K. due to licensing restrictions. The operation of the app is described on the BBC Internet Blog:

The commercial arm of the British state broadcaster, BBC Worldwide, is to launch a mentoring program for digital startups. Selected participants in the BBC Labs program will be offered a variety of support with the eventual aim of creating commercial partnerships with BBC Worldwide.

The idea is not to invest money in the startups or to take an equity share. Instead, BBC Labs is seeking five companies at the point of commercialization that could be taken to the next level through a partnership with BBC Worldwide.

Catch-up programming from the British Broadcasting Corp. viewed on tablets and mobile devices has nearly doubled over the last year, according to data published Tuesday by the broadcaster.

U.K. viewers watching television or listening to radio on mobile and tablet devices was up 94% on April 2011; some 15% of all program requests were from mobiles and tablets in April 2012. The BBC’s iPlayer app is the top free app of all time in the U.K.

For the iPlayer service as a whole, total requests between January and April averaged around 190 million per month—with over 140 million for TV and around 46 million for radio programs—up 24% on the same period last year.

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